Google

On to the desktop

Once again, Google makes Microsoft look out of date

HARDLY a month goes by without Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, launching another cool product that annoys its arch-rival, Microsoft. This month's example is “Google desktop search”, a tiny bit of free software that puts a cute little icon on the taskbar of Microsoft's Windows operating system. It calls up the usual Google page that is used to perform web searches, except that users can now also find almost anything they have lost on their computers' hard drives.

Google thereby addresses one of the biggest problems with today's Windows “desktop”; that stuff is increasingly hard to find. The Macintosh system, which Apple pioneered in the 1980s, and Windows, Microsoft's rather clumsy imitation of it, were appropriate when most PC users needed to keep track of just a few dozen files. Today they tend to have thousands, including pictures, songs and e-mails. If you want to find all the files that have something to do with, say, your friend Jane, forget it.

With Google's desktop search, however, this becomes easy. What makes it so embarrassing for Microsoft is that the world's biggest software company's answer to this problem was supposed to be contained in a new file-storage and search system in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. Alas, in August Microsoft announced that Longhorn would not be available until 2006, and that its new storage method, called WinFS, had been dropped.

It gets worse for Microsoft. For months, Google has also been letting people test its new web-based e-mail service, Gmail. This offers new and more intuitive ways of viewing trails of e-mails. More importantly, it offers huge amounts of free storage, so that users can store their digital stuff on Google's server computers rather than on their own (Windows-run) PCs. Google, in other words, is attacking from every side. And there is more in the pipeline. “Google Print” is software that will help people search inside books (similar to a technology now provided by Amazon). “Google SMS” will help people to search the web from their mobile phones (Microsoft hates this too). Even a Google web browser is apparently in the works.

To be sure, nobody is yet counting Microsoft out. The firm has a record of coming late to new technologies, but then playing so rough (and wielding its operating-system monopoly so shamelessly) that it still manages to be the last one standing. In an effort to catch up with Google, Microsoft plans to launch a new search engine for both the web and the desktop, separate from Longhorn, by the end of this year. But what little of it is visible so far looks remarkably like, ahem, Google.